Forrrrrrrr sho

The content of these narratives really deepened my knowledge of how slaves felt during these awful times.  I never realized how horrible some of the events that regularly happened to slaves could be so horrible.  Louis Hughes, a slave, was traded around numerous times before finding an owner that actually kept him.  Due to this constant shipping, he was separated from his mother at a young age, and could not rely on his father for support, for he was a white slave owner. 

Louis was terribly lonely and had no one to confide in.  Personally, I never would have been able to grow up into the person that I am today, without the care given to me by my parents and friends.  Louis had neither.  These first hand accounts show the feelings associated with slavery and give us some possible reasoning for the extreme actions that they sometimes took.  I now have a better understanding of why Jim ran away, having been separated from his family and treated poorly.  Also, reading this slave narrative helps me to appreciate Huck’s actions more and more because of how daring he was to actually help a slave escape and put his own life in danger.

I found an article dealing with prison statistics in California.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/12/31/RVGNGN44B71.DTL

Just hearing the numbers and percentages of the people in jail makes me very upset.  With the population of the United States being about 20% African-American and a slightly smaller percentage for Latinos.  However, two thirds of the people in these jails are of the two minorities.  This article goes as far as saying that this is a type of slavery.

The right claims that prisons reduce crime, but California’s crime rate was decreasing before the prison boom took off. The left argues that prisons are the “new slavery,” designed to provide cheap labor to mercenary corporations…

Unfortunately, I am aware of the racism that still takes place in our country today and throughout the world.  However, I am simply outraged that people will be this up front about it, and we will potentially enable terrible history to repeat itself.